It disappeared in the growing springtime:
The trees were budding, the students back from Easter,
And comments plugged all-new baseball jerseys;
The signal sank in the noise of the closing day.
What traffic stats we have agree
The day of its death was a spam-filled day

Far from its run-down
The bloggers posted on their WordPress pages,
The maker Tumblrs were untempted by the genuine crafts;
By mindful tweets
The death of the service was kept from the emails.

But for it it was its last afternoon as itself,
An afternoon of IPs and routers;
The address-blocks of its data were emptied,
The storage infrastructure was backed up,
Load was dropped from the balancers,
The flow of its data failed; it became its archives.

Now it is scattered among a hundred redirects
And wholly given over to unfamiliar aliases,
To find its content in another kind of index
And be cited with a foreign quote syntax.
The mails of a dead system
Are modified in the files of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the flamers are trolling like toddlers in the threads of the blogs,
And the poor have the bad news to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in his epistemic closure is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something worth writing a blog post on.

What traffic stats we have agree
The day of its death was a spam-filled day

Originally posted on Making Light